Rob Rebhan

12+ years writing for brands you recognize. Now thinking out loud about tech, AI & what good writing actually costs.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

The Feed is Full. I'm adding to it anyway.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

What I’m most excited about right now: this summer.

America turns 250 today. RealTruck work I’ve spent months building around it is finally going out. There’s a specific satisfaction that comes from work timed well.

The weather is warm. The pool is ready. The kids are home.

After years of bakery summers — early alarms, dough to check — this is the first stretch where summer actually feels like summer.

Not taking a single warm evening for granted.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

Five photos I wish I had taken.

1. An offer letter on a kitchen table. After a year of freelancing, wondering if it was going to add up — the quiet kind of relief. The kind where you sit down and breathe before you tell anyone.

2. The front seat of my first car. A hand-me-down Jetta, key in the ignition, going nowhere yet. I didn’t know where it would take me. I just knew it was mine.

3. Waist-deep in Grand Traverse Bay, looking at my wife. We’d just decided — out loud, in the water — to buy a bakery and move the whole family north. No spreadsheet. Just two people who looked at each other and said yes.

4. A finished chicken coop at the end of a long day. Sun going down. Standing there looking at something we’d actually built — and knowing the homestead life we’d talked about was no longer a plan. It was just life now.

5. A regular Tuesday morning. No bakery to open. Just coffee, quiet, and a blank page. The first day of a new chapter always feels like the first drive in a new car.

You don’t know where it goes yet. That’s the best part.

Every chapter looked different. None of them looked like what I planned. All of them were worth it.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

3. A lot of the job is surviving internal politics, not writing.

The best work sometimes dies because someone three levels up didn't personally connect with it. Writing is maybe 60% of the job. The rest is defending it.

That's the machinery most people never see.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

Three things most people don't know about the ad industry:
🧵

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

2. The "brilliant idea" is usually concept number 24.

Great campaigns rarely come from a single flash of inspiration. They come from a team grinding through 20-30 concepts — most of them bad — before landing on the one that survives client feedback.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

I'm from Michigan, so you southerners can ignore me here. But WOW it's wet and hot.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

Three wins, three losses from this quarter. No padding.

Homestead —
Win: First real summer outside with the family in years. Projects, lawn work, trips. Completely different rhythm than the bakery summers.
Loss: A couple areas of the property are overgrown. Choosing that trade-off, and I'd choose it again.

RealTruck —
Win: The MX4 EZ-Lift launch went off smoothly. Months in the making, a sprint at the end — thinking, adjusting, rewriting, too many Teams meetings.
Loss: Some personal departures forced us to scale back email sends. Mostly automated right now. Want that to change.

Content —
Win: Writing every day and putting it online for nearly a month now.
Loss: Reading has slipped from where it was this winter. Summer weather wins that trade every time.

Every loss this quarter was a choice, not a failure. That's the version of "behind" I can live with.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

I'm a one-day-at-a-time person. Too much looking ahead means missing what's right in front of you. Time's a thief. The moments go whether you're present or not.
So here's my version:
Things I'm doing right now that I hope future me is grateful for — writing online every day. Doing work I'm proud of. Teaching my kids something useful. Showing up for the people who need me.
None of that is a five-year plan. It's just today, done well.
Do that enough days in a row and the future tends to take care of itself.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

New car prices are accidentally creating the golden era of the aftermarket.
When a new truck costs $70,000, keeping the one you have makes sense. But nobody wants a stock beater. They want it better — lifted, upgraded, personalized.
YouTube closed the knowledge gap. You don't need a shop anymore. You need an afternoon and the right video.
The expensive new trucks are doing the aftermarket a favor.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

New car prices are accidentally creating the golden era of the aftermarket.
When a new truck costs $70,000, keeping the one you have makes sense. But nobody wants a stock beater. They want it better — lifted, upgraded, personalized.
YouTube closed the knowledge gap. You don't need a shop anymore. You need an afternoon and the right video.
The expensive new trucks are doing the aftermarket a favor.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

If I had 30 minutes with a stranger, I'd want to hear about every car they've ever owned.
Mine: a hand-me-down VW Jetta. A Pontiac Torrent. Two Chevy Cruzes. A Ford Flex. And a Ford E-350 12-passenger van — because five kids doesn't leave room for subtlety.
Every car is a chapter. The Jetta was independence. The Cruzes were practicality. The van was the white flag — and I mean that in the best possible way.
Tell me yours. I'll tell you what it says about you.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

Five years ago this summer, my wife and I had just moved the family to northern Michigan.

Three kids. A bakery we'd bought on a vacation-fueled hunch. One full-time employee holding the whole operation together while Lindsey ran everything — front of house, staff, product, customers — with a calm I still don't fully understand.

I was support staff. Hung out with the kids, showed up where needed, did my ad job remotely from a new town while the world was still figuring out what Covid had done to everything.

We thought northern Michigan would be slower.

It is — in the way a river is slow until you're in it.

The town is gentle. Our lives were anything but. We were bakers, copywriters, team leaders, parents, homestead maintainers — and somehow still the kind of people our own parents wanted to spend time with.

Northern Michigan is only slow aside from the jobs we held.

That first summer: Lindsey was building a bakery team from scratch — finding people willing to show up at 6am. I was managing my own team remotely, learning to lead people I couldn't see. Two operations. Two kinds of people chaos. Same house.

Five years later: two more kids. The bakery sold. The homestead still standing. The career still going, just with a different view and a lot more perspective about what work is actually for.

Same town. Same priorities.

The jobs have changed. The priorities haven't moved an inch.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

I wouldn't call it trauma. But getting laid off is never nothing.

My position at MRM was eliminated when GM moved contracts to other agencies. A restructure that took a lot of good people with it.

I saw it coming. Which in some ways made it harder, not easier. There's a specific kind of dread that comes from watching something arrive that you can't stop.

But here's what I didn't see coming: how well-built my life was to absorb it.

The severance was good. The bakery was still running and needed me — one of our main bakers had taken time off and I was able to step in. The family got more of me than they usually did. And for the first time in years I had unhurried time to think about what I actually wanted next.

Most layoffs are just loss. This one accidentally handed me three things at once: time, purpose, and perspective.

About three months later, RealTruck came out of the search. A role that turned out to be its own education in ways the agency world never was.

The superpower wasn't resilience — I'd already had to build that. It was proof. Proof that the life I'd been quietly constructing outside of work was real and sturdy enough to catch me when the work disappeared.

You don't know how well you've built something until it gets tested.

Turns out I'd built better than I knew.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

The most underrated thing I look for when hiring: who they are outside of work. Skills can be taught. Portfolio pieces can be coached. But the person who shows up to a brainstorm with genuine curiosity — about cars, cooking, music, whatever — brings something to the table that no resume captures.
Shared interests aren't a nice-to-have. They're the connective tissue that makes a team actually mesh. When people have something real in common, collaboration stops feeling like work and starts feeling like a conversation.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

The worst advice in the writing industry: "just one more round of revisions."

I've watched good work die this way. Not from a bad brief or a weak concept — from revision cycles that outlasted the energy behind the original idea.

Round after round of feedback. Each one making the piece a little safer, a little more committee-approved, a little less like anything anyone will remember.

There's a version of revision that isn't about making the work better. It's about delaying the moment when someone has to commit to it.

When "let me sit with it a little longer" is the default response to every draft — you're not refining. You're avoiding.

You can perfect something to death. I've seen it happen. The eulogy is always the same: "we just wanted to get it right."

Here's what twelve years of shipping work taught me: the version that goes out is almost never the version anyone imagined at the start. And that's fine.

A campaign that's live and imperfect teaches you more in a week than one that's still in revision after a month.

Done is not the enemy of good. Endless revision is.

Set a revision limit before the project starts. Two rounds, maybe three. Agree on it upfront. Ship the work and let the real world tell you what to fix next time.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

Finding your client's voice isn't magic. It's a three-step process anyone can follow.

Step 1: Listen before you write. Get on a call. Ask them to explain what they do like they're talking to a friend at a backyard cookout — not a pitch, not a presentation. Record it. The words they use when they're not trying are the words you're looking for.

Step 2: Find the phrases they'd never say. Look at their existing content and make a list of words and sentences that feel stiff, generic, or borrowed. Corporate-speak. Buzzwords. Anything that could have been written by anyone. That's the voice you're replacing — and knowing what it isn't is half the battle.

Step 3: Write one sentence they'd put in a handwritten note to a client. Not an email. Not a post. A handwritten note — the kind you actually think about before you write because you can't hit backspace. Personal enough to feel human, considered enough to feel professional. If you can distill their message into something that would land in that format — warm, specific, no buzzwords — you've found the voice. Scale up from there.

Listen. Eliminate. Distill.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

My unfair advantage: I grew up inside the ad industry before I ever worked in it.

My dad spent his career on the strategy side. While I was in high school, he'd talk about the work over dinner — how a brief gets built, what makes a campaign fall apart, the difference between a client who trusts the work and one who's going to kill it in review. I was absorbing the language of the industry years before I sat in my first agency chair.

In college he pointed me in the right direction. When I graduated, he suggested the right places to look. But here's the part I'm most proud of: he never helped me actually get a job. He knew my skills would get me in the door. He was right.

A few years into my career, we ended up at the same Detroit agency. Different departments — he was strategy, I was creative. The first project we worked on together, our coworkers kept looking back and forth between us—it's hard to mistake that I'm his son.

What that gave me wasn't just industry knowledge. It was a way of seeing both sides of the brief — the strategic thinking that decides what to say, right next to the creative instinct that figures out how to say it. Most writers learn one side, but I grew up watching both.

Some unfair advantages you build. Some you grow up with. The trick is recognizing them before they're in the rearview mirror.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

A common misconception about my work: if I get five days to write something, people assume those five days are mine.

Like there's a version of my calendar that just says "writing" Monday to Friday, and I disappear and emerge with a finished piece.

That's not how it works. Not for me, and not for most people doing creative or strategic work inside a company.

Here's what those five days actually look like: meetings I have to be in. Kickoffs for other projects. Regroups on last week's work. Re-writes based on feedback that landed at 4pm.

The actual writing happens in the cracks. Twenty minutes here. An hour there if I'm lucky.

The five days were never the work. The work was always happening in the spaces around everything else.

A five-day deadline doesn't mean five days of writing. It means: by day five, the writing that happened in the gaps needs to add up to something finished.

Understanding that changed how I plan everything. I stopped waiting for a clear five days that was never going to arrive — and started treating the gaps as the actual schedule. Because they always were.

[Rob Rebhan @JohnSlashRob]

A common misconception about my work: if I get five days to write something, people assume those five days are mine.

Like there's a version of my calendar that just says "writing" Monday to Friday, and I disappear and emerge with a finished piece.

That's not how it works. Not for me, and not for most people doing creative or strategic work inside a company.

Here's what those five days actually look like: meetings I have to be in. Kickoffs for other projects. Regroups on last week's work. Re-writes based on feedback that landed at 4pm.

The actual writing happens in the cracks. Twenty minutes here. An hour there if I'm lucky.

The five days were never the work. The work was always happening in the spaces around everything else.

A five-day deadline doesn't mean five days of writing. It means: by day five, the writing that happened in the gaps needs to add up to something finished.

Understanding that changed how I plan everything. I stopped waiting for a clear five days that was never going to arrive — and started treating the gaps as the actual schedule. Because they always were.